This week occultist Peter Levenda appeared on the UFO Modpod podcast with Jason McClellan, Maureen Elsberry, and Ryan Sprague to discuss his involvement with ufologist and rock musician Tom DeLonge’s “Sekret Machines” UFO disclosure project, in which DeLonge and a cast of novelists, occultists, and ufologists say they will disclose U.S. government UFO secrets provided by shadowy “insiders” through a series of novels, nonfiction books, documentaries, and scripted entertainment. Levenda’s contribution is looking to be a masterclass in postmodern obfuscation. But to understand this, it’s probably a good idea to give a little background on “Sekret Machines” world.

​“This project is about changing the cynical views of youth towards government,” Tom DeLonge told former Democratic political operative John Podesta in a leaked email published on Wikileaks, alongside many others discussing all the ways DeLonge planned to monetize UFOs to produce profitable entertainment aimed at the youth market. Because that’s how you disclose mind-shattering truths. For cash. With Steven Spielberg and Vice News. “Please understand the teaser is made to ‘pander’ to a youth audience, and then we will change their views in the actual film from a conspiratorial one, to a new non-cynical and supportive one,” DeLonge wrote, echoing claims he made in a less condescending way in the introduction to the first novel in his “Sekret Machines” series, Chasing Shadows.

In that introduction, DeLonge defends using fiction to tell the “real” story of the UFO conspiracy: “The events, locations, and moments of wonder are all true. We weaved them together in a way that echoes what really happened to those who stumbled across something spectacular, wondrous, and a bit frightful. The glue is fiction. The building blocks are not.” But then he twists the lucrative knife of financial exploitation: “And by design, we are not answering all the questions that may be posed. A lot of these answers will come in later books, over time.” Translation: We’ll keep milking this cash cow until you get bored giving us your money for books we admit have no real revelations.

The jacket copy for Levenda’s first “Sekret Machines” nonfiction book, Gods: An Official Investigation of the UFO Phenomenon, due out in March, reads like P. T. Barnum’s efforts to show patrons the fabulous egress: “Sekret Machines is the result of input from scientists, engineers, intelligence officers, and military officials -- a group we call the Advisors -- and transcends the speculation of journalists, historians and others whose conclusions are often either misinformed or only tease around the edges of the Sekret Machines. […] If nothing else, readers will come to the conclusion that the Phenomenon is not what they think it is.” Be wary of anyone who tells you that world-shattering truths require a cash payment for access. One would think that such important facts wouldn’t come with a fee.

You will remember that yesterday I mentioned that a Trump surrogate declared that facts don’t exist anymore because truth is relative. The echo with Levenda’s discussion of why “Sekret Machines” crosses promiscuously between the realms of fact and fiction was frighteningly clear. This is how Levenda described and justified DeLonge’s claim that some aspects of his “disclosure” would only be revealed in fictional narratives, while Levenda will provide a nonfiction book that offers supplementary documentation and research:

​Sometimes you can’t tell a story really clearly using nonfiction. Sometimes you have to use fiction. You have to give a kind of context for what’s going on and show the emotional content of what you’re doing. And I think the division between fiction and nonfiction is something we’re very familiar with in the West—it’s part of our scientific worldview—you know, there’s science over here and there’s religion over there, for instance. But there are some countries where, for instance, the biographies of famous people will be put in the fiction section of a bookstore, or of a library, as opposed to a nonfiction [section]. There are some cultures that believe nonfiction is strictly nothing more than dates and facts and figures, but once you start to tell a story, once you start to tell a narrative, a fictional element comes in. […] It doesn’t mean when you’re telling fiction that you’re lying, you know. You can tell a truth in fiction just as much as you can tell it in nonfiction.

No. No, no, no, no, no—a thousand times no.

I think we had better start at the beginning, with Levenda’s pernicious conflation of two different versions of “truth.” The first is the common definition of truth—“the body of real things, events, and facts.” The second is the spiritualist and the occultist’s view of truth—“a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality.” By running these together Levenda falsely alleges that one must use parable, allegory, and lies to describe that which is real. Fiction is by definition lies, and while it can reveal the second meaning of truth, the transcendent spiritual meaning, it cannot be trusted through its nature to report the body of real things. The skeptic might with reasonable logic argue that the second definition of truth can be accessed through fiction because spiritual truths are themselves a fiction. But it is not my place to insist on that point, nor is it necessary to evaluate Levenda’s.

The larger problem is this: If you cannot or will not relate what is happening in the real world without resorting to fiction, then you are a bad writer and researcher, a moral coward, or a fraud. The bad writer and researcher lacks the data to craft a compelling narrative. The moral coward fears stating truth as unadorned fact will cause trouble for him and so shies from doing so. The fraud disguises the lack of reality for his claims by dressing them up in an ersatz puzzle box, à la the Shaver Mystery, where Ray Palmer claimed Richard Shaver’s novels about a subterranean civilization contained hidden facts, which he encouraged readers and other writers to investigate, conveniently generating publicity and cash. Now, granted, in the middle twentieth century Truman Capote led the charge for the “nonfiction novel,” in the mode of his own In Cold Blood, but in theory the nonfiction novel was to be purely factual, literary only in technique not fictional in content. Also, we learned much later that Capote was to an extent a fraud, fabricating parts of the book.

Did you notice, too, that Levenda quietly equates science and religion with nonfiction and fiction? He swaps to the two sets of terms in order to subtly imply that if science and religion are, in Stephen J. Gould’s famous phrase, “nonoverlapping magesteria,” then so too are nonfiction and fiction coequal truthtellers. It’s a clever bit of rhetoric, playing on the audience’s respect for faith, but the faith one places in God is not the same faith that the reader should place on the honesty of Peter Levenda or Dan Brown.

I also wasn’t too much of a fan of Levenda’s appeal to cultural relativism as a defense of deceiving the reader. So what if some cultures declare all narrative to be at least semi-fictional? You are allegedly reporting a series of bald facts about U.S. government knowledge of space aliens. This is not an emotional issue; it requires no narrative. The facts, should they exist, are facts and should be given as such, with the documentation needed to evaluate their accuracy. But Levenda wants to wrap the facts in a cloud of mysticism, like Athena hiding Odysseus in a sea mist on his return to Ithaca, except that in Levenda’s cloud, we might never find Odysseus, or distinguish him from any other man wandering blindly about.

Here is the real genius of Levenda’s and DeLonge’s stances: It allows the “Sekret Machines” project to make the most outlandish and ridiculous claims under the cover of fiction, while providing only incomplete and partial support in the “nonfiction” volumes because they can allege that some “truths” can only be told in fiction—while leaving it to the reader to make (false) assumptions about what parts of the novels are true or false. The “supporting” nonfiction need not prove its case because the novels “prove” any leaps of logic in the nonfiction through appeal to higher emotional truths and secret material that can’t be officially revealed. Levenda conceded that his nonfiction material supplements material “Tom has access to,” but which Levenda did not independently verify. It’s simply faith.

Levenda praises himself for having “credibility” in the “writing of history,” and he offered that DeLonge is working with him because DeLonge wasn’t able to do basic historical research. Levenda claims, though, that he isn’t able to determine whether various UFO researchers are credible, so he chose to “massage” information from all of them. He also makes a logical error: that DeLonge’s sources are too diverse and too consistent in their message to be lying. He underestimates the pervasiveness of the UFO myth and how easy it is to concoct a story to fit it using the fake material available now. But here he gives the game away a bit—he heavily implies that some things are given as fiction because there’s no way to confirm the wild tales DeLonge’s sources spin. Similarly, the credulous Levenda alleges that a “space program” source confirmed that the Majic-12 myth is “real,” but, sigh, Levenda simply can’t reveal this earth-shaking information because the source said it’s only “background” and can’t be used. Uh-huh. He can tease it and talk about it as fiction, but he can’t give the facts. How convenient.

Let me give an example: What if I said “I have a secret source I’ve met with—a very credentialed, serious source—highly placed in the U.S. government who confirmed that unicorns are real and the government has a secret breeding program in southern Florida. Unfortunately, he won’t let me tell you his name, or where the unicorns are, or show you a picture of them. You have to trust me, but I wrote a novel about it that might (wink, wink) have some details for just $19.99 plus shipping.” The only thing that gives Levenda’s version the illusion of credibility is the preexisting belief that the government is hiding things. Substitute a more ridiculous MacGuiffin and the artifice begins to show through.

This is not to say that Levenda is intentionally lying, or that DeLonge is. For all I know they have fooled themselves into thinking that there is a vast and secret occult world all around them, something that all of the documentation I have ever seen argues against. Heck, they might even be telling the utter truth, but still they failed to offer the evidence needed to prove it. Levenda’s and DeLonge’s particular approach to blurring the lines between fact and fiction undermines the case that there are actual facts beneath the layers of speculation and fantasy.

Essentially, “Sekret Machines” is a modern version of the Shaver Mystery (complete with sub rosa government involvement—cf. the Shaver fiasco to DeLonge and Podesta’s Wikileaks emails), and it’s no wonder that Levenda—active and purposely obfuscating participant in the partly fictitious Simon Necronomicon affair—would be happy to play along. It is probably telling that Levenda lavishes praise on Jacques Vallée, who writes the foreword to Levenda’s new book: “he approaches it (UFOs) in such an intellectual way—and intelligent way!” Vallée, as my readers will remember, is a slipshod, credulous researcher who repeated many of the same lies for five decades until I called him on them. He coasts by on his reputation as a French intellectual, and his air of Continental glamour, but in the end, he is simply a speculator talking grandly about subjects he never bothered to understand at the granular level needed to draw solid conclusions. It’s a match made in whatever occultists hold for heaven.

As the Tipitaka reveals, those people who are wise should have no faith in the pompous fools who claim to be great gods; only through studying the teachings of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Arhats can real truth be defined as well as understood.

If these pseudo-scholars were having any access to even a hair's tip of wisdom, they would try to present Nagarjuna the Philosopher and Alchemist as in contact with aliens. He is alleged, after all, to have gained teachings from nagas, who are, whether beings of fresh or sea water, portrayed as non-human intelligences. Certainly, this interpretation would be erroneous to many Buddhists (in the same way as to Jews and Christians it is erroneous to portray Ezekiel as having been abducted by aliens), but this type of claim would introduce many people to the Buddhadhamma as taughten by Nagarjuna, which is the very essence of truth, as I and many other Buddhists affirm.

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Just some guy, you know?

12/5/2016 01:15:52 am

Why should you believe the "Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Arhats" but not anything else? What justifies trust in the former but not the latter?

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Tom

12/3/2016 11:57:25 am

I have noticed over the years how flying saucers went out of fashion and UFO's became the cover word for what was and is a fraud. It was a fraud when Kenneth Arnold first described seeing boomerang shaped objects and the press printed he had seen flying saucers. From that moment boomerangs disappeared and flying saucers were "seen" all over the world a quite silly meme like notion.
When that craze began to die down a more "scientific" approach was adopted by the frauds and charlatans so was born UFO meaning any light in the sky was worth a headline. After 69 years of frauds and their failure to find ANY evidence which they pretend is due to vast conspiracy by the Governments of the world (as all liars and crackpots do) many of the the frauds and liars look for new ways of misleading the public.
Writing this nonsense as "faction" will have the effect of encouraging people to winnow these publication for non existant secret knowledge in a similar way that some pretend by using the discredited "occult books"which means whole thing becomes little better than superstition with no connection to the real world....
Apart from the money to be made!!

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A Buddhist

12/3/2016 12:05:16 pm

Fraud may be too harsh a term for the distortion of Arnold's sighting. Arnold claimed that the objects flew like saucers flew when skipped through water, and journalists took these words and used them. Inaccurate and misleading? Yes. But I think not fraud, since there was no attempt to deceive, merely to condense for publication. Others before and since have been involved in UFO related frauds, but not the reporters dealing with Arnold, I think.

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Tom

12/3/2016 12:34:09 pm

Yes, they actually used the words "flying saucers" whilst showing a photograph of Arnold holding a drawing of the boomerangs he saw which actually show boomerang shaped objects.
Perhaps not many Americans knew what a boomerang was or perhaps the reporters considered the word unAmerican or simply did not take the trouble to look at the drawing. In a post truth world I suppose deliberate distortion of the facts might charitably be termed a misleading headline like the infamous London Double Decker Bus found on the Moon fiasco in the British press a few years ago.

Cesar

12/3/2016 12:19:38 pm

“Since the original publication of Wonders in the Sky, two of the world's leading UFO researchers Chris Aubeck and Jacques Vallée have continued to investigate both new and existing cases WITH THE HELP OF A GROUP Of EXPERTS ON THE INTERNET”.

Jason, when is your book on unicorns slated for release? I'll gladly pay you for a work of fiction that will assuredly be more entertaining and better researched than any ufologist book. ;)

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Ken

12/3/2016 05:10:31 pm

Back in the 1980's I published a book titled "How to Solve Any and All Differential Equations". In the preface, I included the caveat 'the methods discussed in this book are a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, thus may not always yield the correct solution...'

I sold several hundred copies, but over half of them were returned.

In my defense, I do know a little about advanced math, but not everything, thus the logical solution seemed to be to write what I knew as non-fiction, then stretch the truth in the fiction section. Chances are people don't ever try to solve the hard problems anyways.

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Graham

12/3/2016 08:05:41 pm

All this means is that the New Ages notions, derived from Postmodernism, which ironically started out as a form of literary criticism have come full circle.

If you ever listen to certain episodes (42 & 80) of the Exposing PseudoAstronomy podcast you will hear New Agers using scientific terminology with vastly different meanings to refer to the same object.

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Brian

12/4/2016 08:57:23 am

How, how, how do we do battle against the relentless lying propaganda that has taken over public discourse all over the world? How do you educate a population that doesn't want to be educated, that revels in its willful repudiation of reality? How do facts become important again? Does everyone have to suffer through some terrible catastrophe to come out of this self-induced daze?

Look at this week's covers of The Enquirer and The Globe, available at every supermarket checkout line: still blasting out lying headlines about Clinton's non-existent evil deeds. I know people who bought wholesale every ridiculous Macedonian-made-up claim about Hillary and spew spittle when declaring that she murdered an FBI agent! Look at what's happening in France, Austria, etc. Lies being spread as truth to undermine democracy everywhere.

Propaganda and lies have always been a huge part of human history, I know, but in the past 40 years or so we managed to keep them a bit in check with a media that by and large was considered fairly trustworthy. Now no one seems to believe anything except what they want to believe (or can make money out of), and scream at anyone and anything who dares say different.

I hope this is a short-lived swing of the societal pendulum. But all I have the strength to do now is keep my head down and read my Latin and Greek while trying desperately to avoid the crazies.

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An Over-Educated Grunt

12/4/2016 08:58:53 am

So let me get this straight.

We are going to restore people's faith in government, instead of a conspiratorial, confrontational view of government.

By publishing a book that alleges a government conspiracy.

And we're going to do it as fiction because we have to protect all our sources. Because they'd be in danger if we told the whole truth.

I don't think these folks know what half of the words they use actually mean.

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Assonaut Exaterressial

12/4/2016 11:48:59 pm

If you blink 182 times you'll miss Sekret Machines. Tom DeLonge should stick to music and selling his signature strats and es-335 models to kids. At least it's a semi-honest living.

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Andrew

12/5/2016 10:32:48 am

Levenda's stance is, of course, completely unrelated to his other new book, The Lovecraft Code, where Levenda(quoting from the blurb) " turns to the novel as the best and perhaps only way to tell a story that has to be told - that hidden within the tales of America's most iconic writer of gothic horror, H.P. Lovecraft, runs a vein of actual terror."

Ignoring the right-but-wrong description of Lovecraft as a writer of gothic horror, Levenda seems to be positing that the Yezidis are actually remnants of the cult of the Great Old Ones. Sounds right up your alley, Jason.

And of course, John Podesta is involved, because the owners of Comet Pizza corresponded with him, offering their venue for a Hillary fundraiser. This of course, gets mentioned in the Wikileaks dump, and the investigative geniuses of 4chan and reddit naturally tie them into their myth of John Podesta being a child molesting satanist. You can tell they were Americans, because if they were Brits, they would have lassoed Freemasonry into the accusations.

This was predicted by Bruce Sterling in his novel, Distraction. Or did he channel it from the future, disguising the truth of his precog abilities in fiction?

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KK

12/25/2016 08:04:35 pm

I love the summation of this business from a random website I found.

http://www.aamorris.net/
“These mysteries must remain unsolved or the audience won’t come back for more. An external guide or conspiracy guru is usually put forth as an ‘expert’ and ‘researcher’ who then, more often than not, and wittingly or unwittingly, proceeds to liberally mix some truth with a lot of fantasy. No real answers or only absurd ones are offered. The mystery remains an eternal and seemingly paradoxical one.”

So yeah, John Keel-->Jacques Vallee-->Blink/Levenda
Passing the torch I guess?

The thing that really gets me is the Podesta email where Blink182 dude says they want to manipulate the kids minds away from a view of UFOs being a real conspiracy....

Bonus data points:

"John Keel shows his hand. This guy corresponded with Keel and met him in person only 3 or 4 times per the article:

https://digitalseance.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/john-keel-vs-ufology/

“I have a personal history with Keel, whom I have known since if memory serves early 1967, when Charles Bowen, then editor of Flying Saucer Review, brought us together. We entered into correspondence. I was young, impressionable, modestly read, uncritically minded, and in the fashion of the period susceptible to paranoia.”

“In any event, I grew up, and away from Keel, though once he had confided his hope that one day I would be the next generation’s John A. Keel. Though I had thought the parting was amicable, I was wrong. As late as the 1990s, long after our personal interaction consisted in its entirety of no more than the rare pleasant note and the even rarer crossing of paths, he was madly spreading slanders whose subject was lapsed Keelist Jerome Clark. When at last I confronted Keel on the matter, he replied that he was only pointing out the obvious, which is that I… “live in a world of paranoid conspiracies and illiterate misconceptions. To curb this you may need extensive psychotherapy, coupled with drug treatment. You are ill and have been haunted by this illness all your life.” And so on. In short, the usual charming way of dispatching critics: they say those things because they’re crazy, in the most clinical sense of the adjective. For good measure, he added the to-me-amusing observation that I have fallen for hoax after hoax.” [xiii] (xiii. Letter dated March 27, 1996.)"

Jasun at Auticulture found this:

"Peter Levenda has apparently “come out” as a former intelligence officer:

“He is also a member of AFIO (the Association of Former Intelligence Officers: https://www.afio.com/”
(see: http://oneradionetwork.com/all-shows/peter-levenda-shocking-alternative-conventional-views-american-history-castro-watergate-manchurian-candidates-deep-state-government-november-28-2016/)

A little odd since he recently made a point of stating, after the pic of him & Podesta came out, that he had never belonged to the CIA or other agencies; I forget the exact wording but it was meant to indicate that he had never done intell. work…."

I replied:

"Oh, I checked the membership ethics section::

“AFIO’s Board of Directors vests the President of AFIO with the power to enforce these membership obligations by removing from membership, with concurrence of the Executive Committee [EXCOM], any member who, in the judgment of the EXCOM, gives cause for dismissal. Such causes include, but are not limited to:

1. Any material misrepresentation of service, employment, or credentials in application for membership, during the duration of membership or when serving in any office in the Association or its chapters.”

So I’m assuming you have to actually be legitimate to join as a member."

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Tom Mellett

12/25/2016 09:04:06 pm

Jason,

I really appreciate the fact that you have turned over so many “Levenda stones” in this analysis of the Sekret Machines juggernaut. May I turn over probably the only one you missed?

Between the publication last June of the Tom de Longe/AJ Hartley volume of Sekret Machines and the future publication of the Levenda volume on March 6, 2017 lies the publication on December 1, 2016, of Peter Levenda's first novel called <i>The Lovecraft Code</i>.

Now, aside from its obvious homage to Dan Brown with the title, the MacGuffin in the book is the Necronomicon itself, ostensibly Lovecraft's version, but given that Peter claims to tell the truth in writing fiction, then it is clear that through this novel he is telling the truth about the Simon Necronomicon.

I have not read the novel, so I would like to quote from a recent review in the NY Journal of Books below the link and also ask you to elaborate on your statement about the “partly fictitious” Necronomicon affair, especially what connection you believe it may have with the whole UFO meme in Sekret Machines and why the boundaries between fiction and fact are erased.

<i>Angell refuses to believe what Aubrey wants: to find The Necronomicon, the very thing causing the loss of his family’s academic reputation.

Before he knows it, Angell’s on his way on a black-ops mission, not only to find the book but to prevent it from being used to resurrect the dead god who lies dreaming. The things Angell previously witnessed are mere daydreams compared to what he’s about to discover, and he no longer has the option of refusing to believe any of it.

“‘The Necronomicon was a joke, a running literary gag . . . an invention . . . He knew these people weren’t lying, but they couldn’t be telling the truth . . . Lovecraft saw it coming . . . his stories weren’t fantasies . . . they were predictions.’”

In his search for the Necronomicon, Gregory Angell will discover the thread of truth running through the lives of everyone coming into contact with the dark tome:
“‘There are sacraments of good as well as evil . . . This is the worship of Death, and worse. There is no God . . . there is no devil . . . there is only us and them!’”</i>
--------------------

Best regards,

Tom Mellett
Los Angeles, CA

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.